A Rake To The Rescue. Elizabeth Beacon

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СКАЧАТЬ discreet and coolly efficient roving agent, when even an earl didn’t dare risk his wrath and put his daughter and grandson out on the street. It was her father’s job to keep his country’s diplomats and spies safe when the usual threats and dangers they faced became too acute to ignore. Lord Carrowe didn’t know the full extent of her father’s powers, but he knew enough to be careful, Hetta recalled with a frown. She shivered as she remembered the wary and brooding feel of poor, half-ruinous old Carrowe House during the day and the creaks and moans of the crumbling old mansion during the night, not much chance of her sleeping for long amid all the Gothic brooding and unease of an old house where murder stole in and out without anybody knowing how.

      ‘Hmm, perhaps you’re right,’ she admitted, ‘but now I have the impossible task of finding somewhere for us to stay where you won’t cause chaos before we hardly have our feet over the threshold, my son. You are seven and three-quarters, Toby, but at this rate you won’t live to see eight and I am tired of all these accidents you keep falling into.’

      ‘The rat wasn’t an accident,’ Toby muttered mutinously.

      ‘I know,’ she said dourly.

      ‘And you didn’t want to stay at the Dowager Lady Porter’s London residence either, Mama,’ he pointed out slyly, imitating her grandmother’s stiff and disapproving butler’s hushed reverence for the place.

      ‘No, but I would rather we had somewhere to go to next before it became impossible to stay another moment, and I would prefer it if my grandmother was still speaking to me as well.’

      ‘Why? You didn’t like her either and we would never have met Lady Aline if we stayed at stuffy Porter House with Great-Grandmama frowning at us all the time and looking down her nose at you. I’m glad I found the poor rat in a trap and let it go in her horrid drawing room when she had her horrible friends to tea. She did nothing but blame you for everything from the moment we got inside her stuffy old house and I never want to see her again. You can’t live there when I go to school, Mama. You would hate it and so would I.’

      Hetta met her son’s bright blue eyes and managed a wobbly smile to reassure him she didn’t hold that particular piece of mischief against him and a sceptical lift of her brows to let him know she could fight her own battles, thank you. Toby was offering her something nobody had since her own mother died: unconditional love and real concern for her feelings. ‘Her visitors will spread the story of your misdeeds and I don’t want the world to think you a monster, love, even if you are one.’

      Toby seemed immensely cheered by the notion and Hetta didn’t have the heart to berate him for his sins again. She blinked hard at the unfamiliarity of being protected by her own son. Nobody had truly worried about how she felt about the world since her mother died. Her father made sure she was physically safe, then went on with his own life. And her late husband had been a prime example of April when he’d wooed her, December when they’d wed. She winced at the memory of Bran shouting in his cups that she’d ruined his life. At least she’d still had enough spirit left to argue he’d reneged on every promise he made to love and cherish her for life if she would elope with him. Even now she flinched at how desolate she’d felt when he staggered to his feet and glared down at her, challenging her with his superior height and strength to blame him for using his looks and charm to bend a lonely schoolroom miss to his will, even if he had done exactly that. He didn’t meet her eyes and carry on with the lie, but belched and slammed out of the house with a lewd comment about finding a woman with some go in her instead of a useless little milksop who still cried for her mother. At least she had faced him down. It hurt to know he’d wed her because he thought her father and grandmother would relent and advance his career once their marriage was a fait accompli. She was seventeen to his two and twenty when they’d wed over the anvil.

      Her father had never laid a hand on her in anger, but he seemed to think she was too grown up to need him to tell her he loved her, even when he sent her back to England after his wife died. Hetta was sure he had loved her mother in a vague this woman fills the gap in my life so comfortably I must love her sort of fashion, and he probably loved his daughter as well, but he had no idea of how to comfort a grieving child when he was feeling bereft himself. He was so relieved to leave her with his mother and bury himself in work again that he’d ignored all her letters pleading to be allowed to join him on his travels and escape the constant criticism and disapproval of her grandmother and the stiff-necked governess hired especially to teach her to be the perfect English gentlewoman so she could attract a stern English gentleman one day. No wonder she had spent most of her time at Porter House fantasising about being adored by a dashing hero out of a Gothic romance. Lieutenant Champion had looked like the answer to a maiden’s prayer, but appearances were deceptive.

      She had been even more lonely in the neat little cottage in Lyme Regis Brandon had bought to store his wife in. Once he realised none of his plans would bear fruit he tried to live almost as freely as if he’d never met and married her. Bran would come home, slake the lust of however many weeks he had spent at sea without a woman on her, then walk away whistling to find the knowing and flirtatious sort of women he preferred to his wife. Never again, she swore to herself as she shook off those uncomfortable memories. Never again would a man woo her, then walk away as if she was nothing. If not for his Admiralty masters’ raised eyebrows Bran would have left her in Lyme that day and never gone back and she would not have Toby. She would not undo a day of her failed romance if it meant losing her son, so she had best forget the past and live for now. The fleeting picture of a man as mighty and passionate as Magnus Haile desperate to share life with her was folly and she consigned that to outer darkness as well.

      Now the next tangle of wagons and porters and furious drivers snarled the traffic to a halt again and it seemed even more stifling inside the tired old hackney than ever. At least Toby was chastened enough by his latest misadventure to only fidget and sigh and peer out of the small window to listen to colourful arguments being traded all around them. Hetta dreaded to think what gems were taking root in his busy head, but she would have to trust him to save the worst for his peers at the school she must find him before summer’s end. He knew enough insults in several languages to keep a pack of scrubby boys happy, but at least their wandering life had given him a wider view than he would have got in Lyme or at Porter House with her rigidly formidable grandmother. Her son had a robust sense of his own worth. Now she owed him stability, she decided as she eyed the sweaty chaos outside the window and sighed. She would have to endure this benighted country while her son grew up and there was no point having the blue-devils about it.

      Since before he was even born Toby had been her counterweight against the failings and sadness of the past, and hope for the future, but she had to be careful not to smother him. The fact that most schools were closed for the summer let her put the idea of him going to one at least as a weekly boarder to one side, so she could at least get her breath back and give herself more time to look around for a place that wouldn’t stifle his character and try to turn him into the crushed pattern card of a gentleman. Not that it seemed likely, but the attempt to force him into such a mould would end in disaster for him and his mother, so she would need to be very careful about this school and the place she would eventually settle—nearby, but not too near.

      The new Earl of Carrowe’s odd behaviour seemed a good way to distract herself from thoughts of her imminent parting from her son, so she let him steal her anxiety about the future, as the ancient vehicle finally trundled on. Shouting at Toby to come down off his less than noble roof had almost shocked her son into the tumble Lord Carrowe had claimed he was trying to prevent. The panic in the dark eyes the Earl shared and yet didn’t quite share with his younger brother Magnus had looked odd as well. Understandable for her to feel her life was hanging in the balance while Toby teetered between safety and a crashing fall, but why had his lordship been so concerned about a boy he didn’t even like? He’d continued to stare at the chimney Toby was clinging to even after he had let go and taken the lesser risk of a jump into the ancient attic below rather than a fall to unkempt grounds far too many СКАЧАТЬ